The cloud computing paradigm is spreading rapidly as organizations of all sizes realize the benefits of on-demand, self-service compute capacity, improved efficiencies, higher resource utilization and rapid elasticity to scale up and down. By migrating new and legacy applications to use cloud computing s...ervices, organizations have become more agile and reduced their time to market while shrinking capital and operating expenses.

The Intel® Cloud Builders program provides reference architectures in the form of basic hardware blueprints with Intel®-based servers running cloud computing software such as Nimbula Director*. This paper describes a basic hardware architecture on which we build a cloud environment using the Nimbula Director software and is not intended to be used “as is.” The use cases in this paper can reduce the learning curve while provisioning, administering, and maintaining your first cloud and should be used as a foundation on which more complex, scalable, and resilient cloud computing architectures, adapted to your specific needs, can be built.

The audience for this Intel Cloud Builders guide includes:

Enterprise IT organizations looking to transform their internal data center infrastructure into a cloud environment and make controlled use of external clouds, with the goal of offering better services to their internal customers or users.

Service providers and systems integrators looking to transform the cost structures and agility of their client offerings by providing cloud computing services and solutions that accelerate revenue potential by reducing time to market and stimulating innovation.